We must be, we expect, a couple of rare birds indeed, perhaps the only couple who regularly journey halfway around the world from our Montclair home to Hong Kong to eat Italian food.

Odd? Absolutely not, for there now exists in the city — traditionally the best concentration of Chinese cooking — restaurants serving splendid Western cooking. Along with the best of Canton and Beijing, Hunan and Shandong, Shanghai and Hangzhou, there is Italian cucina as finely rendered as in a Roman trattoria or a gilded Turin dining room; and French cuisine suitable for the culinary altars of Paris and Lyons.

Here is to be found the refined cooking of Bergamo native Umberto Bombana, whose 8½ Otto e Mezzo Bombana restaurant is the pinnacle of Hong Kong’s Italian kitchen. His cooking has earned him three Michelin stars; he’s the only Italian chef to be so honored outside of Italy. Just a walk away along the Victoria Harbor waterfront in the Four Seasons Hotel is Caprice, a grand French arena with its chef Vincent Thierry, who left three Michelle rosettes in Strasbourg and promptly piled them up again in Hong Kong.

To be sure, Hong Kong’s obeisance to food, its obsession, rests historically on the bedrock of its great Chinese cooking, two practitioners of which are chef Mok Kit Keung among the red-lacquered trellises of Shang Palace in the Kowloon Shangri-La Hotel, and chef Chan Yan Tak in the sleek Lung King Heen restaurant high above the harbor lights in the Four Seasons. Chef Mok has two Michelin stars, chef Chan has three, but the two are equal in our estimation.

Which is why we had tender white asparagus from Bombana’s kitchen wedded to the choicest of culatello di Zibello from Emilia-Romagna, which we loved as much as chef Mok’s tiny pork ribs slowly braised to tenderness in sweet black Chekiang vinegar. The dishes were equalled by Thierry’s green pea velouté in which bobbed plump morels stuffed with Bresse chicken mousse, and chef Chan’s fresh foie gras poached slowly in an abalone-flavored sauce “the way the French do.”

These days, Hong Kong is a gastronomic maze. French bistros coexist next door to old teak tea houses. Steakhouses by the score — American, Japanese and Australian — open up next to noodle shops and other soup shops serving sweet bird’s nest concoctions. Cheese-tasting alcoves sit next to wine bars, and coffee-and-pastry shops share corners with snake soup vendors.

The city happily accommodates food fads, vogues and trends, real or imagined. You will be told that fusion is gone. Or not. Yunnan ham is the next craze. Or not. Hong Kong is crammed with luxury hotels and with them has come luxurious food. Or not.
Nobu has an outpost here, as has Robuchon and Gagnaire. What is new and surging in New York today recurs in Hong Kong tomorrow.

Food gurus, real or self-appointed, are listened to. The aura of Ferran Àdria, once all-encompassing here, is gone, but not forgotten. Just recently he was quoted as suggesting that Peruvian cooking was the next greatest. Within two weeks, Hong Kong had two Peruvian restaurants.
before westernization

When we first met here more than 50 years ago, it was a British Crown colony, an enclave of alleys and shopkeepers. Today it is designated a special administrative region of China, a fast-moving forest of high-rises and economic purpose. Back then, its kitchen was a collection of traditional eating places — noodle shops, tea houses and dumpling vendors. It roasted the best ducks in the world, as it still does, and made the best hot pots, as it still does. There were virtually no restaurants of luxury, and its cooks prepared perfect soups and stir-fries. Meat was pork.

There were foods our female half grew up with and was expert in, and about which our male half knew nothing. Over the years we have seen Hong Kong’s Chinese cooks embrace not only traditional Cantonese cooking, but the foods of all of China’s regions and schools.

Western cooking — with its infinite varieties, its many kitchens and techniques, and its entrepreneurs — has stormed into the city and become assimilated. A well-to-do middle class that loves food and wine has become knowledgeable about both. Well-trained chefs abound.

The Star Ferries between Hong Kong Island and Kowloon offer spectacular views of one of the world's most dazzling waterfronts.Vincent Yu/AP Photo

Among those we like, and whom we visit at every opportunity, is Gianni Caprioli, Potenza-born former personal chef to the Agnelli family of the Fiat fortune, who came to Hong Hong and set up his own restaurant, Giando. If you go — and you must — go on a night when he has his fettuccine covered with a thick ragu of stewed wild goose, guinea fowl and wild duck. Or stop in at Gaia for true tastes of Roman cooking from chef Paolo Monti, the embodiment of a Roman cook.

It is a continual joy to walk into the restaurants of these Italian culinary stars, as it is to visit Bombana, and over the years all have given us pleasure. Recently they have been joined, with great fanfare, by highly publicized chefs such as Mario Batali and Michael White, eager to leap aboard the bandwagon for Italian food here. Because Hong Kong has enjoyed the best of authentic Italian fresh, flown-in produce, these two entrepreneurs of near-Italian, Italian-ish cooking have been greeted with welcomes that can be called less than tepid. Hong Kong knows.

Traditional chinese

For the Chinese traditionalists, there is the Yan Toh Heen restaurant in the InterContinental Hotel, where chef Lau Yiu Fai annually tries to retire but is refused by his customers. And chef Siu Hin Chi, a Cantonese purist in the Langham Hotel’s T’ang Court who, despite the current uproar over serving shark fins, keeps them on his menu “because my customers demand it.”

We always stop in at Dong Lai Shun for a mutton hot pot presided over by chef Kenny Chan, Hong Kong’s resident expert in the foods of China’s north. Nor do we fail to eat at Mah Wah, a temple of Cantonese cooking atop the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, which this year welcomed the master chef of Hangzhou’s 100-year-old Zhiweiguan Weizhuang to the restaurant for a small festival of Yangzhou cooking. Chef Zheng Zhongfei’s lessons in the Yangzhou tradition, a singular event, was no surprise to this Chinese audience, observers of traditional cookery.

Encountering the many kitchens of Hong Kong is a pleasure on many levels. Taste, to be sure — to renew the authentic flavors that we seldom encounter in the United States. Smelling, watching. Eating street food and such surprises as dim sum dumplings filled with foie gras and truffles.

Perhaps a stop at Cova, the Hong Kong branch of the pasticceria confetteria founded in Milan in 1817 for pastries, espresso or bo lei tea.

Eating decisions are difficult in this city, but we are relieved of making them until our next visit. Our Chinese food will be home-cooked (a given), and who knows? Perhaps there might be a weekend in Rome.